"TOliver" wrote in
:

Snakes and turtles are desperately people-shy. Most ponds
can be "safed" for routine swimming by arriving with a lot
of noise, carrying on and popping beer cans, the mild
screams of dates in insufficiently sized bathing wear being
groped, etc., but wise swimmers have been known to cut a
branch with which to beat the water before entering,
sending snappers and snakes a'flying.


When young, I had occasion to play in a lo cal creek and small
pond (really an old over-flow depression, slightly dammed up
to make a watering hole for larger farm animals, back when
there was a farm there) bordering several neighbors' yards and
mine, and an old 'pig waller' where we kept various carp, too
pretty to plant with the corn, caught out by a damn some miles
away. We had snappers, large-ish and small, in all three
watery places.

By the pig waller lived one old and ornery snapper, easily the
size of a volkswagon tire, which took to eating our pretty
fishies. That snapper would lurk on the edges of the waller,
looking like an old and mossy rock. Several times he was trod
upon by unwary or inattentive youths, and turned a neat trick
of lifting his backside while bending his head and neck up and
back, to catch the unsuspecting prize for supper. No matter
that the child was too large to consume - a good chunk of a
foot would have removed, enough for a good snapper snack.

In the creek bed lived another large snapper, prone to the
same trick, which we dug out one summer (my sis and I,
reminiscing about our sordid childhood while on vacation the
week before last, agreed that the official reason lay with a
neighbor's youngest child being just of an age to wander into
the creek but not understand about rocks that are really big
hungry snappers - the real reason was, well, 'cause it was
there) with some assistance from a parental unit once the
snapper was freed from its rocky and muddy embrace. I believe
the snapper was consumed for supper by the family of the
parental unit who attended the undertaking.

An old snapper, lazy and embedded in a snug mud-hole or rocky
stream bed, will not flee. It will just wait for something to
happen by, and, be it fish, stick or foot, will bite what it
can reach, in hope of a meal or morsel.

--
TeaLady (mari)

"The principle of Race is meant to embody and express the
utter negation of human freedom, the denial of equal rights, a
challenge in the face of mankind." A. Kolnai
Avast ye scurvy dogs ! Thar be no disease in this message.